Thursday of the First Week of Lent
The Lord always hears
I thank you, Lord, with all my heart; before the gods to you I sing. I bow low toward your holy temple; I praise your name for your fidelity and love. For you have exalted over all your name and your promise. When I cried out, you answered; you strengthened my spirit …Though I walk in the midst of dangers, you guard my life when my enemies rage. You stretch out your hand; your right hand saves me. The Lord is with me to the end. Lord, your love endures forever. Never forsake the work of your hands! Psa 137
“Thank you, Lord, with all my heart, before the gods to you I sing”. When meditating on this psalm a few circumstances come back to my mind in which the Lord, or Mary, have satisfied my prayer, but those memories are only a fraction of all the times when this happened. The anecdote quite far away in time belongs to my childhood: I was really a little scamp, every day doing something wrong and my father, when I came to know, was used to practice that he called a healthy “brush up”, because at that time the methods of education were more rude than those of today. One evening, while I was climbing the stairs to get home, after having behaved more hard than usual, which my father was already reported, I had this prayer: “Holy Virgin Mary, help me, because tonight I am going to be heavily struck”. I rang the bell and my father came to the door: “Wash your hands – he said – and come to the table because the soup is cold”. After that event, which is one of my fondest remembrances, even if far away, the list of prayers that I addressed to the Lord and which have been satisfied would be really too long and still incomplete. The circumstances are more diversified: the desks of the school, the university exams, the work, the illnesses, the children with their problems, the friends in need, the family budgets. Among all these reasons, all very serious, what I like to remember are futile requests that I call the “candies of the Lord”: a parking lot that seemed impossible, a ball which seemed not to enter the goal during a soccer game or the car keys which I did not remember where I had left. However, these are events of the past, while the Lord is “in life”, he is at work also today, so I expect he will satisfy a prayer I just have made, because “When I cried out, you answered……Lord, your love endures for ever. Never forsake the work of your hands”.